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My parents were both active members of biker clubs and regularly brought me along to events.

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This is another unique setting that was a common part of my childhood. My parents being part of a biker club exposed me to a lot of different types of people all at once. The clubs my parents belonged to were all different and being exposed to people of all those different backgrounds taught me a lot about language in a social light. Going to these meetings showed me how my parents code switched with their interactions with each other in different settings, this is something I distinctly remember noticing in my youth and I developed that into my own relationships with people. I also engaged in code switching in a way that contrasted my code switching in different settings. When I was around all of the bikers, I felt younger, so I played into being the only child or one of the few in those settings. I didn't play up my use of academic language, instead I felt like I was around family so I spoke with more informal sentence structure and word choice, but still not in my most comfortable language, which would be AAL. When there were hispanics at the meetings I would practice my Spanish. When we would go to formal bike meetings where they handled club business, I would engage in reading the pamphlets that were passed out to members. I recall learning several different words both from asking my mother and googling their definitions when I made it home

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My mother used to bring me to work with her as a child instead of leaving me at home alone.

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An unique aspect of my childhood that also developed my literacy and language skills was that for most of my childhood, after school I would join my mother at work. She worked in the grooming salon of Petsmart, which meant I spent my time hanging out in the break room doing homework or exploring the store. This environment helped develop my abilities to communicate with my elders. I was conscious about not sounding like a child (even though I was one) so I tried to use my best vocabulary while interacting with my mother's coworkers. I tried to be as academic as possible and talk about things in my life that would be relatable to them. In this environment, I observed my mother code switch between talking to guest versus her coworkers, like I did in school with my teachers and friends. Observing this helped develop my skills with code switching. My mother's hispanic coworkers helped me practice my oral and written Spanish skills as well. Any time we'd speak in Spanish they would correct my mistakes and cause me to translate for my mother when she was curious which helped reinforce my knowledge and ability to conjugate verbs. I spent a lot of time doing my readings and writings for class in this environment, so a great deal of my grasp on English grammar developed here as well.

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School was where I developed in depth knowledge about my second language as well learned a third language, which increased the complexity of my identity.

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School was the setting that my knowledge and expression of English developed. My mother helped me with the oral aspect of learning english by translating German to English for me in the house with typical words I used at my age. Once I started school I knew a kindergartener's amount of words in both English and German. As I progressed through school, my expression of the English language grew within my writing and reading capabilities. As I engaged with more literature in English, I gathered more knowledge about sentence structure and grammatical rules, which in turn helped develop my writing skills. I also learned more about different writing techniques and styles and my knowledge of poetry also expanded.
School was also the first setting I was exposed to African American Language in. My peers were the first people I heard using the language and I related to those who used that language. I always wondered if English being my second language left me more impressionable to learning AAL because I found certain aspects of the English language to be more difficult to grasp, where in AAL it makes more sense to me. Because I picked up the use of AAL, I began to code switch as well as dropping word endings that end in "-ing". Code switching became important in distinguishing between talking to friends and adults in the school setting. I usually only engaged in AAL when I was exclusively talking to my peers. Whenever an adult was around, I would immediately use my best English and try to sound more academic.
School is where I learned Spanish. Spanish was a language we were forced to learn but that I fell in love with early on, so I continued studying it into college. Adding Spanish to my repertoire of languages developed my cognitive abilities and presented me with new social opportunities, like teaching my mother another language and being able to interact with a large population of my community. It especially helped me once i joined the work field.

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Home was where I engaged with my native language as well used language brokering to teach my family about our second language.

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At home is where I was exposed to German (my first language) the most. If my mother wasn't addressing myself or my sister in German, I would also overhear her talking to our family members in German. I moved to the states when I was 4 so my mother wanted me to focus more on learning English so I could communicate when I started school. She started speaking more English at home so that I would pick up the language better. Once I had a good grasp on English and got older, I noticed the roles changing. I started language brokering for my mother for the more complex English words I was exposing her to through school paper work and my oral language, or even in media we were consuming together. As I got older and developed more friends, I also noticed my speech at home changing. I started using more African American Language at home that I was learning from my friends at school. I recalled several instances when my mother corrected my use of the Habitual "be" and substituting words like "finna" or "fixin to" instead of going to. She wasn't aware of the validity of AAL and thought I wouldn't be successful in school because I talked like that. My home wasn't a setting where a lot of reading was done, from any of my family members. However, in my childhood I did engage in a large amount of writing practices at my home. I wrote music and poetry in my free time and would perform to my mother when I could. She was always supportive of anything I created and I appreciate how that helped me be confident in my voice as I grew up.